"Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last and it always tells the truth."
- Margaret Atwood
This is probably how we all react to books. That's the intimacy we share with our favourite books.
I believe we all have had that moment when we pick up a book to examine it, read the blurb and the author's name. The book's name is obviously geeked at first. But then we judge the cover by twisting our wrists as if we are some kind of saint.
Book covers are fascinating features to our books and what most readers may or may not know, the author is never really satisfied with the cover. But that is not the problem. The problem lies in the fact that a ton of authors themselves don't have a clear vision of what they want as their cover. To the fact, the underlying is that what authors want, isn't always the right thing.
So the struggle of a book's physical cover is not just the visual, but the touch and feeling towards it. It's responsibility still lies unchanged. Protect the book, no matter how pretty you are.
But with digital book covers, the fuss of design is lost to me. The exact notion of a book cover is to shield what's inside the book and the binding of the pages. It is because of book covers that tangible copies are pushed and pulled, poked and prodded in and out of shelves more than one time. It is the bodyguard.
Digital copies, on the other hand, have a very mundane quality to its existence. In easier words, it's either here or there. But everywhere. Their safe place is behind a screen - or let me say, behind any screen. There's no need for book covers to these copies as physical copies do.
The idea of hardware, digital book has nothing to do with marketability, does it? The very fundamental idea behind it was meteoric and facile access to words and texts and literature in general. But having easy-going, swift text with an exchange of the touch of a book doesn't seem worth the transaction.
Covers are meant to establish a tone of the book and with that, seduce readers "into its content" and not the design. There's a difference. Book covers are not the bread and butter of the books yet they have to be a part of the book itself in a sense to understand it and represent it in the right way.
To my understanding, e-book covers are much more competitive in nature - they don't protect the book, nor do they hold it together. But hell, sometimes they aren't even witnessed and hence, the other e-book cover with brighter colour or catchy fonts will hold the attention of a reader.
So in the end, somehow we end up back to square one: what if digital books didn't have covers? It almost wouldn't matter, would it?
YOU ARE READING
(What if).. Books didn't have covers?
Random"I write to facilitate myself with my deepest emotions." How much can a book cover hold or represent? How authentic can the artwork of a book jacket be? What stories do they tell? Do these covers bear the artistic weight of their books? Through dee...
